The highlight of Porto for me was definitely the fancy feeling of being on a Harry Potter set!

Porto was where J K Rowling spent most time in when she lived in Portugal in the pre-Harry Potter era. And a visit to this magical city would give you an insight on where she may have gotten her Harry Potter inspirations from.

Portugal was never on my bucket list. I only decided to add it into our itinerary because it’s the closest to Spain and the weather seemed warmer compared to the other countries in the month of February, when we planned to travel.

Who would have known, our two short days in Lisbon turned out to be the best days of our entire trip!

For the beautiful weather, lively city, friendly people, and down-to-earth living expenses, Lisbon is a holiday destination that I would recommend to everyone.

Amsterdam was the first stop of my 2013 2-week Europe trip. It was one of the best trips of my life as I was lucky to have travelled with my longtime Taiwan bestie, C, and my younger sister, Ju.

We picked Amsterdam as a meeting point before we embarked on our journey to Spain and Portugal (click to see my trip report). Even though we had, overall, 3 full days in Amsterdam, we didn’t cram too many tourists attractions in our itinerary as it was mainly a stopover to overcome our jet-lag. We only had three main things that we wanted to see: the windmills, “coffee shops” and the red light district.

Halong Bay, a must-see nature’s wonder that resembles the fantasy-like landscape of the movie Avatar, is indeed itself a piece of oriental heaven on Earth.

We joined the 3-day-2-night itinerary on the Dragon’s Pearl Junk operated by Indochina Junk. The word “junk” means ancient Chinese sailing vessels, like our Dragon’s Pearl. There are a lot of junk operators in Halong Bay, picking the right one would definitely enhance your overall experience with this magical place so my advice is: don’t skimp on it!

The literal translation of “Tam Coc” is “three caves”, and this place is commonly known as the Halong Bay on the land. Before my trip, I saw a lot of forum posts comparing Tam Coc and Halong Bay. Some people even went as far as saying that Tam Coc is better than Halong Bay.

I beg to differ.

My honest opinion is: Tam Coc was pretty impressive but it did not have half of Halong Bay’s charm.

Apart from the restaurants that had high ratings on Tripadvisor, we also allowed ourselves to be a little more adventurous and tried random hawker food that we saw on the streets that appealed to our inner Taiwanese (Taiwan has the best hawker food culture). Luckily, everything that we ate in Hanoi was fabulous and didn’t have too much of a disagreement with our stomachs!